


Porcelain Dolls

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-21
Updated: 2006-02-27
Packaged: 2019-01-19 17:32:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12414756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: Dear Miss Evans,We regret to inform you that in a recent Death Eater attack on your house, your mother, Elizabeth Evans, was killed. There was also extensive damage to your house from the fire. You will be allowed home for a period of five days to attend to funeral and cope with this tragic loss.





	1. The White Dress

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

"Hey."

Lily looked up as the shadow fell over her. 

"You're that girl..the one whose mom died in that fire, right?" the girl standing over her asked. She towered over Lily in her black platforms, to the point where here bubblegum pink undewear was visible under her black minidress. 

Lily looked away. "Yeah, that's me." 

"Sucks. Smoke?"

Lily looked up sharply and found herself faced with an open package of cigarettes. "Who are you?" She was put off by the girl's attitude towards her mother's death. Most people either tiptoed around the issue, treating her like a bomb about to explode, or avoided her completely. 

"Name's Charlie. I'm here living with my cousins 'cause my parents couldn't deal with me anymore, but orignally I'm American." Lily tugged at the hem of her shorts uncomfortably as she noticed the self satisfied smirk on Charlie's face. They sat there in silence for a while, Charlie smoking and Lily's thoughts wandering. 

Charlie's question had forced Lily to accept what she'd been avoiding since that day at breakfast. 

_As she sat down at the Gryffindor table with Emmeline, Lily busied herself with glaring at Potter and his pals and getting the gum out of her hair, rather than eating the eggs that Emma had piled onto her plate. She didn't notice the hush that swept over the hall as the black owl flew in, nor the significance of it's landing (rather than just dropping the letter into her eggs). She was so distracted that she even managed to take the letter, shoo the owl away, and scan through it once without fully realizng what was going on._

_The hall had regained its normal volume at her unconcerned and almost nonexistent reaction to the letter by the time it fully hit her. She snatched it out of Emma's hands, for her housemate had picked it up to see what it said._

**_Dear Miss Evans,_ **

****

**_We regret to inform you that in a recent Death Eater attack on your house, your mother, Elizabeth Evans, was killed and your sister, Petunia,  injured._ ** _**There was also extensive damage to your house from the fire set by the Death Eaters. You will be allowed home for a period of five days to attend to funeral and cope with this tragic loss.**_

****

**_Our condolences,_ **

**_The ministry of Magic_ **

_She stared at the letter for a few moments, stunned, then calmly stood, dropping the now crumpled letter onto the bench, and walked out of the hall._

"Hey! Hello? Girl, snap out of it!"

Lily blinked rapidly and turned back to Charlie. "Sorry." She glanced at her watch and realized that she had to go or she wouldn't have time to shower and salvage something to wear. She muttered her good byes and left Charlie sitting on the curb, smoking. 

\----------------------------

Lily drifted through the room like a waif, not wholly there but not totally transparent either. She ran a hand over the perfume bottles and jeweled boxes, the lipstick tubes and the makeup bags, all of her mother’s things. Her reflection, gaunt, dull, and hauntingly thin, stared back at her with sunken eyes and she looked away quickly. The funeral was in a few hours…she had to find something to wear. 

Her hand, still drifting over the contents of the vanity, struck the corner of something cold and she refocused her attention on what she was touching. When she saw that it was a picture frame with two pictures in it, one with her mother looking like a doll, posed and made up, and another tucked beneath that Lily herself had taken in which her mother was not wholly aware of the fact that her picture was being taken. Her eyes, strikingly blue, were unfocused and she stared at something through the window. 

Lily had always admired her mother’s beauty, but she had loved this picture the most because it showed her mother, Lizzy, not Elizabeth, the porcelain doll she’d become. A line from somewhere, a song perhaps, came to the front of Lily’s mind and she whispered, “She hides behind a porcelain mask 'til she can’t tell the difference anymore…”

She drew her hand away from the picture as though burned by the memories and was drawn by some inexplicable force towards the closet. The door was open and amidst the colors, reds and blues and pinks and more, a spot of white caught her eye. Wrapped in plastic and slightly dusty, the sundress had not been worn in years. Not since Lily herself had tried it on over four years ago had it even ventured outside its plastic home. 

She laid it down on the bed and stared at it for a while. The plastic cracked beneath her fingers and the paper on the hanger was almost gone, but the dress itself remained white and clean. To Lily it was perfection- innocence untainted and beauty in its purest form. It was the dress she would wear to the funeral. Her father and sister were already at the park, so there was no one in the house to stop her. Something in her gut was telling her that she should wear the dress, that her mother would not have wanted her to look depressed at her funeral. 

Today she was Lily, white and pure, the death flower.

She took a long hot shower to calm herself down, then sat outside in the sun and let her curls dry naturally. As she sat in the garden she noticed the lilies growing near the back- hidden, but beautiful just the same. She hadn’t realized they were still alive, as much of the house had been wrecked in the raid. 

There was one rather small lily that stood out from the rest simply because it was so perfectly formed, and she waded through the rest of the garden with little regard for the rest of the plants and picked it. She stood there for a few moments, staring at the flower and wondering how it had turned out so perfectly, so beautifully, then turned and tromped through the flowers once more. Her feet were filthy at this point, but she didn’t care because she would be going to the funeral barefoot anyway.

She walked back into the house and up the stairs to her parents’ bedroom, where the dress was still laid on the bed. She slipped it on easily and, having decided she would wear the flower in her hair, took a couple of bobby pins from the top drawer, where they always had been. The pin made a sort of squelching noise as she pushed it through the base of the lily, and she pinned it into her hair so that a single curl hung separately from the rest, wrapped twice around the flower. 

Then she sat down at the vanity and took her choice of her mother’s makeup. A deep red lipstick, pale green eye shadow, and just the barest hint of blush completed the look. 

Lily Marie Evans, daughter, death flower, porcelain doll. 

She walked to the funeral, having both time and no other means of transportation, and arrived just as it started. Silently, so as not to draw attention to herself, she crept up behind and seated herself in the seat furthest back. There she sat, a speck of white in a field of black, looking terribly out of place and feeling somewhat reckless again. 


	2. Home Sweet Home...

Chapter Two

Lily looked away and ignored her sister as the girl screeched a her about her dress. 

“Lily, you stupid freak, stop ignoring me! What were you thinking, wearing white to our mother’s _funeral_?! Have those freaks you’ve been hanging around all year affected your brain? Or is it just not there anymore? My god I can’t believe even you would do something so unbearably abnormal and disrespectful. I’m ashamed to call you my sister!” 

Lily almost snorted at that. Big news there, eh? She grew tired of her sister’s yammering and began walking back to their house. 

“Lily! Lily you come back here right now! I’m not finished with you, you little freak!”

                                                      -+-+-+-+-

She stared at her father over the dinner table as he struggled with what to say. They hadn’t really spoken in a very long time; no more than a few words exchanged over the weather or how her day had been. He wasn’t around much to talk to, and so they had grown distant. 

She almost opened her mouth to say something, but some sadistic impulse wormed its way out of the corner of her mind and  told her to let him shift around uncomfortably. She’d been doing that quite a lot recently, letting people squirm in discomfort and attempt to come up with something neutral to say. 

She shuffled her uneaten dinner around her plate for a while, waiting and stretching the silence out until finally he said in a defeated voice, “ _Please_ eat something.” She merely continued to poke her peas into place around the mashed-potato-mountain as trees. He frowned and placed his plate in the sink and went upstairs to his office. 

“I’m sorry I’m so absolutely horrid, Daddy…” she whispered into the empty room. 

                                                     -+-+-+-+-

Charlie scanned the park, her eyes moving over the large area before coming to rest on a lone figure on the swings. She jogged over till she was standing in front of the redhead, then leaned down and inched her face forward till they were nose to nose. 

“Hey girl,” she said. Lily blinked rapidly in response and focused her gaze on Charlie. “So here’s what’s up. Being that this country is totally  whacked and doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, I’ve decided to host my own amazing, invitation only, no adults, all you can stuff your fat face with Thanksgiving dinner.” Lily made a noise of acknowledgement in the back of her throat, which Charlie took as a sign to continue. “Yeah, and you’re like totally gonna be there. Here’s all the info,  and if I don’t see you there within twenty minutes of the time I put in thee, I will personally hunt you down and drag you there.” 

Lily blinked a couple times, took the envelope that Charlie shoved at her, then said in a small voice, “Okay.” Satisfied by this answer, Charlie smiled brightly and bounced off.

                                                    -+-+-+-+-

The next day, Lily showed up at Charlie’s house, barefoot, but right on time. It was cold to be walking around without shoes, but she didn’t seem phased by it. She did, however, shiver a bit and pull her sweater tighter around her small frame.

“Lily! Rock on, you made it!” Charlie exclaimed happily. 

Lily nodded and muttered her own small, “Hi.” The house was filled with the smells of so many different foods, and several other kids their age milled about, eating, talking, and drinking. All in all, it was warm, cozy, and inviting. 

Lily followed her hostess as she was told where to put her sweater and introduced to people, nodding and walking and shaking hands at the appropriate times. 

For the most part, it was blurry. She remembered picking at her food, and drinking quite a lot of wine, but for the most part she’d felt rather separate and unattached, both from herself and her peers. It was all sort of unnerving, really, because they were all so festive and cheerful and she felt so numb. So completely lost and cold and unfeeling and hopelessly left out. What stuck out most in her mind afterwards was not what had happened, but that she had become even more socially inept, if that were at all possible. Had her mother’s death served to isolate her even further? 


End file.
